vosmiura Wrote:He did say "hidden". Sure adding the story to the front of the cards makes going through the kanji quicker. Does it teach you how to recall the kanji well without having that aid though? If I recall, there was at least one member who said he had a hard time recalling without looking at the story.

No, I totally agree that adding the story to your cards is probably going to be damaging in the long run. You want to make 100% sure you can recall the kanji just from keyword. That's why, since I've now finished adding kanji, I've whited out all of my stories. If I can't remember the kanji from keyword I fail the card.

But when you're actually in the process of adding 100 cards/day the difference between getting ~150 reviews a day and ~300 is massive. If, for some reason or another, you have decided to add 100/day you can't afford that kind of jump in reviews. That's why I would recommend adding stories to your cards IF AND ONLY IF you are adding 100/day. After you finish, removing the stories is not a problem because you have all the time in the world to cement your memory of the ones you aren't as good at recalling.

I got to around 1000 and moved to Anki, where I now include the stories in my new cards. I plan on whiting them out when I finish, as well. I'm glad that others are doing this. I think it is a way to get into real Japanese more quickly. RTK is, after all, only a stepping stone.

P.S. Also, Khatz supports this practice, but doesn't recommend whiting them out. Personally, I think whiting them out would just speed up the process of associating the kanji with the keyword, but if you're doing real Japanese, you'd be associating them at an accelerated rate anyway, right?

blackmacros Wrote:

vosmiura Wrote:He did say "hidden". Sure adding the story to the front of the cards makes going through the kanji quicker. Does it teach you how to recall the kanji well without having that aid though? If I recall, there was at least one member who said he had a hard time recalling without looking at the story.

No, I totally agree that adding the story to your cards is probably going to be damaging in the long run. You want to make 100% sure you can recall the kanji just from keyword. That's why, since I've now finished adding kanji, I've whited out all of my stories. If I can't remember the kanji from keyword I fail the card.

But when you're actually in the process of adding 100 cards/day the difference between getting ~150 reviews a day and ~300 is massive. If, for some reason or another, you have decided to add 100/day you can't afford that kind of jump in reviews. That's why I would recommend adding stories to your cards IF AND ONLY IF you are adding 100/day. After you finish, removing the stories is not a problem because you have all the time in the world to cement your memory of the ones you aren't as good at recalling.

But why? You'll spend as much time "post-RTK" cementing kanjis that you never really learned as you would if you just went through at a slower pace.

Sorry, I know we've already argued this before...

sethg Wrote:I got to around 1000 and moved to Anki, where I now include the stories in my new cards. I plan on whiting them out when I finish, as well. I'm glad that others are doing this. I think it is a way to get into real Japanese more quickly. RTK is, after all, only a stepping stone.

P.S. Also, Khatz supports this practice, but doesn't recommend whiting them out. Personally, I think whiting them out would just speed up the process of associating the kanji with the keyword, but if you're doing real Japanese, you'd be associating them at an accelerated rate anyway, right?

The Khatz recommendation is what prompted me to start including stories. The argument that broke out about this earlier in the thread prompted me to really think about the process and, upon reflection, I determined that for someone doing 100/day it is a useful practice. Our argument also convinced me, however, to white out the stories once I'm done. Khatz doesn't suggest this, but I agree the other forum members who pointed out that it might adversely effect your ability to recall from just keyword.

That's my take on the issue, but each to his own obviously.

EDIT: @Mafried
Yeah sure you'll spend as much time post-Rtk cementing your knowledge, regardless of whether you went through at 100/day or not. But for varying reasons some of us *have* chosen to do 100/day. Personally, I had already started a Japanese course at my university before stumbling upon AJATT and then RtK. I wanted to do RtK because I saw the benefits, but I couldn't afford to let the process take many months while I neglected other aspects of my Japanese. So I decided to get it done as quickly as I could. For somebody who makes this kind of decision, it is important not to drown in reviews. Including the stories helps with this.

(Warning! This post may contain Walls of Text)

You know I was sitting here waiting for a response for a few hours then you all post stuff while I'm busy converting episodes of Pokemon to put on my itouch... AJATT says choose something you're familiar with right? I'm pretty sure I have the standard plot of Pokemon drilled into my head after those informative middle school years. ^^

Anyway back to things that matter, as others have been posting after me yes, I am putting the sentences on my cards via the method of:

<FONT onClick="this.innerHTML = '%(text:Story)s'">Story</FONT>

Now that I've finished RTK I'm going to start failing every card if I have to look at story when my reviews a day drops below like... 150, cause even without new cards my... 384 I reviewed today took a huge chuck of my time.

Now I read something interesting:

mafried Wrote:But why? You'll spend as much time "post-RTK" cementing kanjis that you never really learned as you would if you just went through at a slower pace.

Sorry, I know we've already argued this before...

Hrmm, well first off I agree with the idea I think you are getting at. Obviously 100/day is not good for getting them cemented in like 20 would be. And the added looking at sentences without failing card don't help the matter, but I'm not sure let's say... 50/day is better. There are a lot of things to avg... like do you spend the same time overall with both? how helpful is the next step the "sentence phase" for remembering kanji? etc... It also can depend a lot on the person so we can't judge what is best. Without a doubt the time after being finished with 100/day before you reach a reasonable # of reviews is going to be longer than 50/day people, but you have 20 extra days to get them cemented. But yeah, far too much probability and guesswork for my taste, I'm am engineer, I don't work in such thingies

I will say for myself personally though 100/day was my best option. Until the 29th I will have no computer meaning no new kanji. All I can do is use ankimini to review. So the above guesswork works out for me being in favor of the 100/day so I'd have them all done before my trip started, and can use that time to review. I'm a good example of how all sorts of things can change what's best for ya. Least I think so. ;;

As for the stories... I don't think I could ever stand putting them visible on the cards, because I trust my memory like I trust other people out on the road (i.e. not at all). I do like the idea of not outright failing though because a lot of them with one word, the word not always even being one of the "primitive words" has jogged my memory. Does seeing "... done." and then immediately thinking of the kanji really deserve a failure? Also, I'm not sure what you guys would think of me... but I did do something else on the cards I was particularly bad at. In parenthesis I would put a "cue" word to help me with the sentence. Like: 需, I would put "(the) demand", to help me come up with "Supply and DEMAND is simple enough, when it RAINs the DEMAND for COMBs goes up to deal with wet hair." I dunno how bad that is in terms of memorizing but for the cards I've done it to my ability to get them right has gone from like 10% to 90%. It's those words that has quite a few various ways of using, and I can't seen to get the right form for the sentence. Like when I see "demand" I always think of someone demanding something of me first, but seeing "the" in front of it knocks that out of a possibility allowing my mind to wander to the correct sentence. I plan on removing them later... but for now I kind of like my mini-crutches I have for like, 20 cards.

That may have made little sense but it's 4:01 here and I'm tired, but gotta finish packing; <(@_@)> curse you anki it's already taunting me with 33 reviews already, too bad those are Sunday reviews so I dun have to do them till I get up BWAHAHAHA.

(This post was made in a factory where Walls of Text are also produced. If you are allergic to Walls of Text it is recommended that you do not read the preceding. Thank you and good day!)

Like klaoth, a lot of the time I found that it wasn't the primitive that would jog my memory but just the first word of my story. Something as simple as the words "in the..." that started off my story.

Anyway on the subject of reviews. They are absolutely killing me >.<. I was very, very naughty for the last ~400 cards and added them at a pace of 100/day but didn't review them. I knew I shouldn't have but I did it anyway goddamnit. So I've still got around ~250 new cards that I have yet to review. I'm knocking that back, but only at the pace of around 25 a day. That's because I'm still hovering around 180-200 reviews per day. Ack.

On a completely unrelated note, I downloaded Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in japanese and am working my way through it. It's a lot of fun but since there is no furigana I find myself reading sentences like: "saber で grass を cut ろう”. I guess this will cease to become a problem as I gradually learn the readings through my other studies (eg. I just ordered Ko2001 yesterday)?

Once I've read this thread I couldn't help but wonder : is 100 kanji a day really that effective?

I've mastered 900 kanji with all their on and kun readings in 1 year and a half and all I can say is that taking it easy and slowly through continuous revisions is the only and best (in my opinion) way for long-term mastering.

Say, if you stopped this 100kanji/day for ~3 weeks, how many would you actually remember?

I've set a goal of 100 per month, which is pretty feasible.

Getting too excited over your achievement might get you even more frustrated if you end up realizing that you've messed up with most of what you took for granted.

I'm not trying to discourage you, I'm just trying to get you to pursue long-term memory of the Kanji which, after all, is all you'll need.

Orenji Wrote:Once I've read this thread I couldn't help but wonder : is 100 kanji a day really that effective?

I've mastered 900 kanji with all their on and kun readings in 1 year and a half and all I can say is that taking it easy and slowly through continuous revisions is the only and best (in my opinion) way for long-term mastering.

Say, if you stopped this 100kanji/day for ~3 weeks, how many would you actually remember?

I've set a goal of 100 per month, which is pretty feasible.

Getting too excited over your achievement might get you even more frustrated if you end up realizing that you've messed up with most of what you took for granted.

I'm not trying to discourage you, I'm just trying to get you to pursue long-term memory of the Kanji which, after all, is all you'll need.

Long term memory of the Kanji comes naturally through use of the SRS over time. Since you're taking it slowly obviously the ones you have learned so far are going to be really cemented in your long term memory already. This is because you've been exposed to them for a year and a half.

As has been pointed out, no matter how long it takes to add all the kanji from rtK (whether you do it in 4 weeks or 3 years) we're all going to be end up reviewing for the same amount of time in the end (forever, presuming you keep reviewing upon finishing).

Of course if I stopped reviewing for ~3 weeks I'd forget a lot of Kanji. Thats because I've only been reviewing them for a few weeks. Once I've been reviewing the kanji for a year and a half in the SRS I'm sure they will stick in my memory too.

I don't think 100/day is the best way to do it for everyone. It might not have even been the best way for me. But it *is* possible, which is part of what this thread was about I think. Plus it means I can get into learning actual Japanese faster which I think is a plus.

Hi Orenji. It is not an overstatement. Check the whole thread and you'll see many people doing it. 100 is an herculean feat, but normal humans can do 30/day just fine.

Have in mind that this 100/day are ignoring the readings completely. The focus is only the writing - the hardest part after all.

These kanji are reviewed continuously in spaced repetition softwares, so they won't be forgotten.

Learning the readings with vocabulary takes far more time, like yourself stated.
But it is much easier after you finished RTK like the people here do.
I've done RTK with 30 kanji/day. It took me 3 months. But I'm studying their readings for 10 months already. I'm now with 2061 kanjis and their readings covered.

You can read more at my blog, the link is in my profile.

Hello, I'm doing 100 per day for 10 days... only story making no SRS.
I'm doing 25 kanji blocks through the morning.
After those 10 days I'll be at 1851, and then go back to 25 per day (~1h).
I'll finish by the 28th of this month.
The 29th I'll do at least 1h of SRS for longer than 3 months every morning before bkfast.

andresito Wrote:Hello, I'm doing 100 per day for 10 days... only story making no SRS.
I'm doing 25 kanji blocks through the morning.
After those 10 days I'll be at 1851, and then go back to 25 per day (~1h).
I'll finish by the 28th of this month.
The 29th I'll do at least 1h of SRS for longer than 3 months every morning before bkfast.

What do you mean when you say no SRS?

Do you mean that you are adding 100/day until the 28th, and then as of the 29th you will start to review them all?

If thats the case I'd be interested in hearing how that works out for you. I added ~400 kanji during my 100/day sprint that I didn't review until after finishing. I still have ~250 of those to get through. On the one hand, for these kanji which I didn't review straightaway, I forgot the story for most of them plus forgot how to write the new primitives for basically all of them. This leads to abysmal 1st reviews. On the other hand, once I go back and quickly review the primitives and take a look at my story I'm usually able to remember these kanji fairly well after my 1st horrible review.

On the balance though I think it would be easier to review as you go. But of course, if I went back and did it again I would do exactly the same thing because I'm impatient

Can we just enter all 3007 on Monday and call ourselves done? I suppose reviews would get in the way of congratulating ourselves too much, though.

Flamebait!

Nice warning. Reviewing is fundamental.

Haha well in my defence I did in the order of ~1200 at the pace of 100/day as well as keeping pace with reviews. And I'm paying the price now (by forgetting) the ~400 I didn't review straightaway. So yes, reviews are definitely definitely fundamental!

dewick Wrote:Can we just enter all 3007 on Monday and call ourselves done? I suppose reviews would get in the way of congratulating ourselves too much, though.

Depends on what you mean by done. Personally, as I started doing RtK seriously, I considered it a life-time investment. I will never stop reviewing, more or less. When I was talking about "finishing" and "getting done", it was just to enter all the kanji into the system so I wouldn't have to "waste time" with the book, just the reviews. For me, the actual process can't ever be completed, just more and more stabilized.

Tobberoth Wrote:

dewick Wrote:Can we just enter all 3007 on Monday and call ourselves done? I suppose reviews would get in the way of congratulating ourselves too much, though.

Depends on what you mean by done. Personally, as I started doing RtK seriously, I considered it a life-time investment. I will never stop reviewing, more or less. When I was talking about "finishing" and "getting done", it was just to enter all the kanji into the system so I wouldn't have to "waste time" with the book, just the reviews. For me, the actual process can't ever be completed, just more and more stabilized.

Yeh I totally agree with that.

Plus, with the ~400 I didn't review straight away I feel like there is a big difference between knowing a Kanji and having forgotten it vs having no clue what it is. So even though I've still got 250 new kanji still to review, when I encounter these ones in the wild I think "ah! I know that! its just a matter of recalling it". Seeing a completely unfamiliar kanji is much more demoralising.

Still, a more patient person than I would have diligently reviewed all their newly added kanji. And they would probably have been better off for it in terms of retention. Ah well, I'll manage to get them all reviewed in the end.

Orenji Wrote:Once I've read this thread I couldn't help but wonder : is 100 kanji a day really that effective?

I've mastered 900 kanji with all their on and kun readings in 1 year and a half and all I can say is that taking it easy and slowly through continuous revisions is the only and best (in my opinion) way for long-term mastering.

Say, if you stopped this 100kanji/day for ~3 weeks, how many would you actually remember?

I've set a goal of 100 per month, which is pretty feasible.

Getting too excited over your achievement might get you even more frustrated if you end up realizing that you've messed up with most of what you took for granted.

I'm not trying to discourage you, I'm just trying to get you to pursue long-term memory of the Kanji which, after all, is all you'll need.

Is there a reason you choose not to separate learning meaning/writing from the readings? There are people here that have learned both in sequence (frist RTK, then readings) in a matter of months, and retained that knowledge.

EDIT: And without the nonsense in some of this thread.

Where is KanjiMood? He should be finished by now, but even if he's not I'm very interested to hear more of his story.

blackmacros, Personally I consider a kanji learned only once it reaches mature status (reviewed with an interval of more than one month). Part of why I and others have been so critical is that you've neglected reviews in favor of adding cards to your new pile, and adopted methods (such as stories on your cards) based on how well that allowed you to keep up your breakneck speed, rather than how well they benefited your long-term memory and Japanese ability, which I would argue should be your only metric.

100/day and still learn is entirely possible as KanjiMood demonstrated. He had a method by which he split the 100 into chunks of 25 throughout the day and kept up with reviews. His method was sound and would lead to long-term retention. That's why I'm curious to see where he is at now.

KanjiMood you out there?

That the success is with those that stick to the very end is not a secret.
It is the tale of the うさぎ and the かめ again. But not all the rabbits are dumb.

mafried Wrote:Where is KanjiMood? He should be finished by now, but even if he's not I'm very interested to hear more of his story.

blackmacros, Personally I consider a kanji learned only once it reaches mature status (reviewed with an interval of more than one month). Part of why I and others have been so critical is that you've neglected reviews in favor of adding cards to your new pile, and adopted methods (such as stories on your cards) based on how well that allowed you to keep up your breakneck speed, rather than how well they benefited your long-term memory and Japanese ability, which I would argue should be your only metric.

100/day and still learn is entirely possible as KanjiMood demonstrated. He had a method by which he split the 100 into chunks of 25 throughout the day and kept up with reviews. His method was sound and would lead to long-term retention. That's why I'm curious to see where he is at now.

KanjiMood you out there?

I neglected reviews in favor of adding new cards to my pile only in the last couple of days. I've already admitted I really shouldn't have done that, but couldn't help myself. Reading through the "I Just finished RtK thread" you see that a lot of people did the very same thing; just not at the pace of 100/day. It's a bit unfair to then view that as representative of my method and label it unsustainable. I spent around 12 days and 1200 cards succesfully at a pace of 100.day while dealing with reviews. Impatience just got the better of me in the end

I used the exact same method as KanjiMood to add 100/day but added stores to my cards. Having finished RtK I've removed those stories. My retention rates are still very high (~85% according to my latest Anki session). Besides which, in a years time it is going to make no difference to my long term memory whether I used stories in the beginning or took 40 or 50 days to finish instead of 38. In the long term scale of things, what happens in the short term gets smoothed out by the SRS process. But it certainly matters right *now* how quickly and efficiently I was able to get through RtK. I had a number of pressing real life reasons that I had to do it so quickly.

PS. The only reason I didn't work through and review all my ~400 newly added cards in a few sittings, letting them filter into my review pile, was because I was heading into a week with 4 assignments due in. Another reason I wanted to finish RtK by that weekend. Regrettably that came at the cost of reviewing those !400 newly added cards.

EDIT:

mafried Wrote:100/day and still learn is entirely possible as KanjiMood demonstrated

I hope you're not trying to imply here that, by the mere virtue of adding stories to my cards I have rendered myself unable to recall the ~1800 cards I have been reviewing?

The people who are against adding stores to your cards (and it is a valid viewpoint, don't get me wrong. That's why I have removed my stories now) seem to have this conception that the moment you add a story you become 100% dependant on it, unable to produce the kanji from keyword and aren't learning anything. I've been reviewing without stories for about a week now and my recall rates for mature cards are about 86% and young cards is 85%. Clearly including the stories was not as damaging as you seem to believe.

The major difference in recall comes on the initial review. With a story I was getting around 90-95% recall (marking the card as hard because I looked at the story). Without the story I got around 70%-75% initial recall. After the first review, recall rates seemed to equalise between including/not including the story.

@ blackmacros,

Don't worry my friend,
Some other folks don't get it; we learn different, we take risks, we double our failure rate, we take good critisims, we're aggressive!

This folks spending their time here telling other's "your way of doing things isn;t going to work" probably are way smarter than us, and probably they already "finished" RTK1~10
and that's fine, I'm learning my way with my failure and success.

keep up the good work blackmacros!

andresito Wrote:@ blackmacros,

Don't worry my friend,
Some other folks don't get it; we learn different, we take risks, we double our failure rate, we take good critisims, we're aggressive!

This folks spending their time here telling other's "your way of doing things isn;t going to work" probably are way smarter than us, and probably they already "finished" RTK1~10
and that's fine, I'm learning my way with my failure and success.

keep up the good work blackmacros!

Exactly. Thank you. So. Much.

If I came off as saying "your method of doing things will not work" then I apologize. That was never my intention. My writing style often comes off as very opinionated (even when I am not), and if that caused this thread to seem less like debate and more like bickering, then I have failed. blackmacro's method of including stories is a valid way to learn the kanji. My belief was and for the moment still is that it is a less efficient means to do so and that one would progress more rapidly in the long run if stories were not included on the question side of the card at any point in the study process. However this is not set-in-stone gospel, and I do maintain an open mind on the issue.

blackmacros, please continue to post about your progress, including hard stats like review counts and fail rates. I find these tremendously useful, and I promise you that I'm paying attention and if the numbers stay good I will have to rethink my position.

mafried Wrote:If I came off as saying "your method of doing things will not work" then I apologize. That was never my intention. My writing style often comes off as very opinionated (even when I am not), and if that caused this thread to seem less like debate and more like bickering, then I have failed. blackmacro's method of including stories is a valid way to learn the kanji. My belief was and for the moment still is that it is a less efficient means to do so and that one would progress more rapidly in the long run if stories were not included on the question side of the card at any point in the study process. However this is not set-in-stone gospel, and I do maintain an open mind on the issue.

blackmacros, please continue to post about your progress, including hard stats like review counts and fail rates. I find these tremendously useful, and I promise you that I'm paying attention and if the numbers stay good I will have to rethink my position.

That's ok, no hard feelings. If it couldn't handle a degree of scrutiny then the method wouldn't be very good, would it?

I can take a print screen of my Anki deck statistics/graphs now (without stories, but with ~250 kanji unreviewed) and then a prtscreen week or so after I've reviewed all kanji if you would like. Unfortunately I have no images of my statistics from during the 100/day process when I used stories. My first time recall rates hovered around 91% I believe, and the recall rate for all cards was something like 94.1%. For cards where I needed the story I would pass it, but mark it as hard.

After dropping stories, first time recall has hovered between 70-75% recall rate. For young cards it has been around 80-85% and recall for mature cards is exactly 86.9% as of my writing.

Anyway when I get home I'll upload some pictures for you all.

EDIT: So I was thinking about this issue while doing my reviews and I realised that I basically had two types of stories on my cards. Some cards start off straightaway by mentioning the primitives. On some cards the primitives came nearer to the end of the story (I usually bold my primitives btw so they are kind of hard not to see). Since my Anki window is quite small I usually have to scroll down to see the primitives in this 2nd case. I actually find I'm recalling these 2nd types of cards better, now that I've removed stories altogether. I guess the conclusion we can draw from that is, if I can see the primitives immediately my mind is doing less work and therefore less likely to remember. This is what you guys have been saying all along, of course.

But yes, I would still recommend stories on cards (if you have decided to do 100 a day) for all the reasons I've stated already. It makes the process more manageable, preventing you from drowning in reviews. And as long as you remove the stories after finishing then you will still develop your long term memory of the cards (I hope! I shall deliver my Anki statistics in a few weeks and you can be the judge of this).

To me it seems that it's better to review soon, rather than "learn" hundreds of kanji before reviewing. Can we even call those "learned" without any test of recall?

The 1st review should take a short amount of time relative to making up / trying to 1st learn the story. And, by starting reviews fairly early (like 1 day after 1st learning), you'll increase your retention significantly and get a good return on the time invested in learning.